Entries tagged with epic cross-country trip

When all of you are walking, it gets kind of awkward because from a distance it's a little hard to tell the difference between we've been walking for days and we're tired and braaaaaaaaains, and then everyone ends up pointing guns at each other's heads, although usually by the time the other person has a gun out that's a pretty good indication that he or she is not in fact a zombie, but then everyone's pointing guns and it just gets tense, you know?

Anyway.

The group Tom has run into consists of a guy, smarmy and college-aged but friendly, and two girls; one of them, once Tom's non-zombie status was assured, promptly sat him down and started grilling him on where he's from, bright and bubbly and efficient. (The other, who's carrying a sawed-off shotgun over her shoulder and keeping a lookout, keeps giving him looks that suggest he had just better watch it because if he causes any trouble she'll have no compunctions about taking his gun and leaving. It's a little nerve-wracking. He suspects the twitchiness makes him look more pathetic than normal.)

"I, um, Detroit, originally," he tells the bubbly girl, who says her name is Heather (and seriously, what are the odds of that?). "I've been on the road since then."

"Like where?"

"Uh, Pennsylvania--"

"Pennsylvania?" repeats the guy (whose name is Evan, Tom thinks), suddenly losing the smarm in favor of urgency. "Did you go through Pittsburgh?"

Tom shakes his head. "No, man, sorry. I came in from the north and headed into Harrisburg. And if you head that way? Don't go to Harrisburg. I got caught in a building by a nasty shamble."

Shotgun gives him a look, resettles her gun on her shoulder, and looks out along the road again. "Good thing you skipped Pittsburgh. That's Romero country."

Evan looks upset, rubbing his face. Tom rubs the back of his neck. "Sorry, man."

"No, no, 'sokay."

Heather eyes Evan, then looks back at Tom. "'s that where you're comin' from? Harrisburg?"

"No, uh, I went on to Philly after that, and then New York--"

Heather and Little Miss Shotgun both sit up at that. "How's New York?"

"Shitty. Better than DC, but still shitty."

"You went to DC?" Evan asks, frowning.

"Yeah." Tom swallows. He doesn't like thinking about it. "Ghost town, man. I think New York got hit harder, but DC was just . . . I mean in New York people are, like, surviving, they're getting together, you know? It's scary, but -- it's like people just left DC to the zombies."

He scratches his chin. He hasn't shaved in a week -- couldn't find a safe convenience store to loot razors from -- and he wonders how Evan is staying so clean-cut. "I went 'cause I figured, you know, maybe the feds were still there, maybe they were working on rebuilding, but . . . nada. Just shambles and a couple crazy survivors that I couldn't get close enough to talk to."

. . . Nobody seems to have anything to say to that.

At least not for a minute. Then Shotgun taps her fingers on the butt of the gun and says brightly, "So did you see Ted Stevens shambling around or what? Not that you could probably tell the difference between normal Stevens and zombie Stevens."

". . . Who the fuck is Ted Stevens?"

She waves a hand. "Never mind."

The tension is hardly gone, but it's at least lessened a little. Heather insists on sharing a few rations with Tom, who (after noticing Shotgun's eyeroll and Evan's rueful expression) insists on sharing a few back. They don't offer to travel with him, which he's kind of grateful for and hurt by at the same time -- it's awkward to turn people down, but it's nice to get the offer.

"Where you headed next?" Heather asks, as they all shoulder their packs and stand.

"West, I guess."

"Lay my head tonight on a bed of California stars," Shotgun mutters, looking absent for the first time, then gives him a hard look. "You should get yourself a flamethrower or something. There's a lot of zombies to fuck up between here and the west coast."

Tom blinks at her, suddenly aching somewhere behind his solar plexus. And get a flamethrower. Can you use a manpack?

It's beyond bizarre to sleep in safety again. Actually, that's just bizarre -- what's beyond bizarre is how little time it's taken for Tom to fall back into the nervous habits of survival that Milliways had nearly trained out of him. It's beyond bizarre that safety became so unfamiliar, so quickly.

Tom tries not to think about that. When he does, he dismisses it with a mental shrug. So safety is a rarity again; with that in mind, hyperactive paranoia is a better attitude than complacency.

(He told Shaun once that he'd rather not stop being a person in order to be a badass. He'd rather not stop being a person in order to survive, too, and a bundle of nervous twitches with a gun doesn't really fit his definition of "person" any more than a cool badass does. Some things can't be helped, though.)

He spends a day recuperating from his travels, surprised by his own exhaustion. The day after that, Jess and Alan give him the full tour of the living area -- the watch posts, the ammo stockpiles, the vegetable garden -- and Tom wastes no time in telling them how impressed he is.

"I haven't seen anything like this anywhere." He straightens up from poking at a growing stalk of corn. "It's -- I mean, it's incredible."

"Just good planning," Jess replies with a smile.

Tom gives her a sharp look. "Did you know--?"

"Nobody knew," Alan says.

"But some of us planned anyway," Jess adds.

"For zombies?"

"What, you never did that? 'Gee, if zombies attacked right now, what would I do?'"

Tom winces. "Never did. I'm not good at, like, large-scale plans."

"A little picture guy," Alan suggests.

Tom winces again. "Yeah," weakly. "You could say that."

He insists on taking watches, and spends some time on the lookout posts with all the other members of the enclave. Val proves more than willing to talk about where she came from -- the South -- and how she ended up in New York ("I got here before Z-day," she explains. "Here when the bombs dropped. That was scarier than the zombies, if you ask me. You can do something about the zombies.") but she doesn't press him to reveal any more about himself than he wants. He stays as vague as he can be about the journey from Detroit to New York and claims a few times that he lost track of time wandering in the midwest. It's not entirely untrue.

Tim is quieter, a little more reserved with a stranger. Tom gets the impression that Tim's parents are out of the picture, one way or another, and doesn't pry. They usually end up debating Kirk vs. Picard vs. Janeway or topics of equally vital importance.

Betty, it turns out, is a singer, and cheerfully breaks into the Beatles and Queen and Leonard Cohen and yes, occasionally, Paul Simon -- always quietly, when they're outside, so as not to attract unwanted attention from either the living or the dead, but with no less gusto for that. One day, Tom bemoans the fact that the last time he touched a guitar was weeks before Z-day. "You're musical!" Betty exclaims.

"Eh." He shrugs. "I worked at a recording company, but I was a suit."

"Do you sing?"

"Oh no no no no."

She does, eventually, get him to join her on the choruses of "Yellow Submarine."

But it doesn't take long for Tom to get restless.

"This isn't working," he tells Jess one evening, four days after his arrival.

"You've only been here a few days. Give it a little more time."

"No, it's just -- it's not working. It's not you guys. You guys are great. Just. You guys are . . ." His chest aches, a little. "You guys are already, like, a family, you know? And you don't have the resources to take care of me on top of everything," he barrels on, since she looks like she's about to respond, "and I really want to find out if there's anywhere at all that's rebuilding. I really do."

Jess studies him for a minute, and then sighs and looks out over the surroundings.

"You know what I miss from before?"

Tom blinks at her.

"I miss biking."

. . . Tom blinks at her more.

"It's impossible to bike anywhere these days." She waves a hands towards the city. "You think biking in the city was crazy before. Sure, now you don't have to deal with the assholes driving, but with the shambles, and the gangs . . . and even if it were safe, I'm taking care of things here. And helping folks survive is worth giving up biking."

"I understand the urge to be moving, is all I'm saying." She shrugs. "So if you want to keep moving, you should. Someone's got to. Where would you go next?"

Tom blows out a breath. "DC? I know they must have been hit just as hard by the bombs--"

"Probably harder."

"--but I mean . . ." He laughs. It's a little helpless. "It's the fucking capital. They must've had bunkers or whatever. Somebody in power must've survived. Somebody somewhere has gotta be doing something, and if they're not doing it here . . ."

"If they're not doing it here," Jess points out, "they may not be doing it anywhere."

"Yeah, thank you, I needed my parade rained on."

"Look, your logic is pretty sound, but you have to be realistic about this. And you have to have a backup plan if DC doesn't pan out like you're hoping."

Tom groans. "I told you, I'm terrible at planning."

"Yeah, little picture. I remember." Tom winces again. "Lucky for you I like planning."

He looks up at her, blinking. She grins.

"So tomorrow we'll sit down and we'll plan, okay? Get you fitted out for the trip."

"You don't have to do that."

"Yes, we do." She waves at the city again. "We're living post-apocalypse, Tom. Somebody's gotta set a standard."

Tom can't speak for a minute or two, but Jess doesn't press him to.

The next afternoon, loaded with food, ammo, and his belongings from Milliways (most importantly, his journal safely tucked at the bottom of his pack, and Shaun's bat over his shoulder), Tom bids a farewell that's a little more teary than he expected to the enclave, and promises to come back.

As the gates clang shut, Jess tucks the gun into a back pocket and leads the way into the building. Tom trails a step behind, cricket bat over his shoulder.

"Welcome to my lair," she tells him cheerfully as they step inside, footsteps echoing. "Look out for Wolf."

Tom blinks at her. "Wolf?"

The clatter of nails on the floor is the only warning he gets before something flings itself at his legs. He yelps, dancing backwards.

The rather raggedy bichon frise who's just impacted his shins dances back at him, panting happily.

". . . Wolf?"

Bark. (Or, more accurately, yap.) Jess grins.

Tom is beginning to think he's fallen in with a group with a very weird sense of humor.

Jess leads the way through a few grand, empty hallways, with Wolf clicking happily along at their heels and trying to entice Tom into playing with her. She finally takes them through a door marked STAFF ONLY into a considerably more mundane hall of offices. It opens out into something that looks like an employee lounge further on.

"Hey!" Jess calls, and a cheerful female voice from the lounge calls back "Hey, yourself!"

"Great, you get a welcoming committee."

"Thought I got one already," Tom says dryly, nudging Wolf away from his shoe as they enter the lounge.

The scene that greets them is almost domestic: a teenage boy with his feet up on a coffee table; a bearded man wearing a yarmulke with a book in his lap, sitting next to a round-faced woman wearing a headscarf; a college-age girl in glasses just coming in from another hallway. It's sort of pleasant and homey.

Except that the round-faced woman is cheerfully cleaning a pistol rather than, say, sewing or something, and the young woman entering the room is carrying a shotgun. That's a little incongruous.

(He realizes a minute later that it doesn't seem as incongruous as it should, which is a little unsettling in and of itself.)

Tom swallows and lifts a hand. "Hi."

There's a chorus of "Hi"s in return, cautious but fairly friendly, which makes him feel a little better. Jess takes over.

"Everybody, Tom. Tom, Tim" -- she points at the young man -- "have fun with that. Val" -- the young woman with the shotgun -- "Alan" -- the man in the yarmulke -- "and his wife Elizabeth."

Some time later, after they've eaten (Betty and Tim cook; the vegetables are homegrown, even if the rice tastes kind of stale and the meat is just Slim Jims; Tom tries not to take more than his share, but when they notice, they encourage him to take seconds), Jess offers to show Tom to his room.

Which turns out to be a cubicle in the office section.

Tom blanches.

"We gave away our last spare cot last week, so I'm afraid you're gonna have to make do -- are you okay?"

"Is there anyplace else?" Tom manages. "I, uh -- when it all happened, I was -- just. Yeah."

Jess winces sympathetically, nodding. "Gotcha. You can crash in the lounge, if you don't mind people wandering through."

"No, no, that's cool. Can I take a watch?"

Jess looks him over. "Maybe tomorrow. You look wiped. Get some rest."

"Thanks." He follows her back out to the lounge and drops his stuff by one of the armchairs. "Thanks."

"No problem. Sleep well."

She turns to go, and Tom straightens. "Um, Jess?"

"Yeah?"

"Can I have my gun back?"

She turns and looks at him for a moment. "Can I have the bullets?"

He sighs. "If you have to, yeah."

"This place is safe. Safe as anyplace is these days."

"I know. I just. I'd feel better."

". . . Yeah. Okay." She pulls the gun from her back pocket and passes it over. Tom lets out a breath as he takes it.

"There's a couple local gangs that call it that," Rue clarifies, voice implying an eyeroll. "Rumor has it they set up a trebuchet to deal with the zombies. I don't believe it, but it keeps anyone from attacking the place."

"Not that it's easy to attack in any case," Beth points out.

"Yeah. Have you ever been here before, Tom?"

He shakes his head. "No. This is my first time out of the midwest."

Beth half-turns to look at him. "How'd you get here?"

A shrug. "Walked."

Beth's eyebrows go up, impressed. "And you're still alive."

"Go figure."

Beth shakes her head. "Wow. Anyway, it's a place called the Cloisters, part of the Met. It's up on a hill by the river and it's a freaking fortress."

"Jess'll check you out before she'll let you in," Rue adds, as they take a turn and begin climbing a hill, "but it shouldn't be a problem. You look pretty harmless."

Not entirely certain whether he should feel that his masculinity has been insulted, Tom nods and watches the city go by through the windshield.

***

The Cloisters are, in fact, a freaking fortress. Beth wasn't kidding. As they reach the gates, he spots a stocky, pony-tailed figure approaching from the other side. "That's Jess," Beth identified over her shoulder.

The ambulance draws to a halt, and Beth gets out. Tom clambers out the passenger side door more slowly, checking warily around the area, one hand on his gun. When he finally turns to approach Jess, she looks . . . suspicious. But approving, under that.

Apparently Beth has been explaining the situation while he's been surveying the surroundings, because Jess holds out a hand when he nears the gates. "Hi, Tom. Give me three good reasons I should let you come in here."

"And not dumb," he corrects. "And not dead." A thought strikes. "And not infected."

She raises her eyebrows. "Can you prove that?"

He wrinkles his nose. "I, uh, suppose if you insist I could strip down."

Another snort. "Thanks for the offer. That's two reasons."

He sighs, scratching his face. "Because I'm tired and hungry and haven't slept someplace that's really safe in -- days, and I'm a total noob to New York and I'll probably end up dead by tomorrow if I don't stay here."

Beat. He ducks his head and adds in an embarrassed mumble, "Not to, y'know, guilt you into it or anything."

Jess smiles. "I don't guilt easily. Where're you from, Tom?"

"Detroit, originally. Now, kind of -- nowhere."

"How'd you end up on the road?"

He sighs, tired. "I got trapped by a shamble in a shopping mall for a month, and I didn't really feel like staying in Michigan after that. I was hoping things would be better in the big cities."

"Soon as you hand me that gun," she repeats, firm. "You can keep the bat, though."

Tom pulls out his gun, glances down at it. It's suddenly, weirdly hard to let go of it. After a moment, he flips it around, ejects the clip, and racks the slide. The bullets go in his bag; the gun goes into Jess' waiting hand.

"You've got to understand," Jess says, accepting the gun, "I've got people in here I'm responsible for. And we get the occasional whackjob who wants in here who'd like nothing better than to get inside and get violent."

"No, no, I get it." He blows out a breath, rubbing the back of his neck. "I get it."

"Okay then." She moves away to set about getting the gates open, and Tom turns to Beth.

"Well, um. Thanks for the ride."

She smiles. "Yeah, no problem." A nod toward Jess. "Think she likes you."

He blinks. "How can you tell?"

A grin. "You used 'noob' in a sentence. She knows a geek when she sees one."

Tom opens his mouth to protest he's not a geek, considers, and closes it again. Beth offers a hand. "Hopefully I won't see you around again."

"Um. Yeah. Thanks again." He shakes her hand and waves to Rue in the ambulance, who waves back with a grin and a thumbs up.

The gates open with a creak, and Tom steps into the Cloisters. Or Bald Mountain, or whatever the locals call it.

Newark. I always figured people were exagerrating about New Jersey being so bad, but Newark really is pretty inhospitable. Maybe the zombie apocalypse made it worse. I don't know.

I'm holed up in an apartment building. (Don't worry, Kendra, I checked it out really carefully before I went in. It's all cleared out.) I actually managed to restock some stuff here, going through the apartments. Some new clothes. It's been picked pretty clean, but the empty beds are a nice break from floors. Not that all the beds are empty. But at least there's no shamble in here.

I don't think anyone is actually living here, but I did meet a girl on the third floor who's getting ready to move out. Heather, I think that was her name. She's scary young. High school age, I think. But she's tough. She said she's heading West. I told her I was going to New York and she gave me a weird look and asked if I was sure. "Sure I'm sure," I told her. "It's your funeral," she said.

Han Solo said it best. I've got a bad feeling about this.

Okay, in all honesty, I don't know what to do. If New York's not up and running, then where do I go? DC? LA? Boston? Chicago? And if NY is bad, how bad is it? I'm scared.

But I've come this far, I guess. And I can't go back home to Milliways and say I got to Newark and chickened out. No way. New York tomorrow.

I really, really hope I don't this works.

March 30, 2004

New York is not up and running.

New York, in fact, is a) largely in ruins, apparently from both bombs and vandals, and b) disquietingly empty in this part of town. Not like empty towns are anything new, but this is New York -- it's supposed to be bustling and bright and stuff like that, right? Not echoing and empty.

And visibility is terrible. Too many freaking tall buildings.

After about five minutes the quietness is seriously freaking him out.

When he hears a couple pairs of purposeful footsteps coming around a corner up ahead, though, silence suddenly seems like the best thing ever.

It's two men, young, carrying baseball bats. They're a block away, but Tom's the only other person on the street, and not exactly hard to spot. One of them points at him; the other grins.

"Oh, shit," Tom mutters, and pulls out his gun. The men stop. Grinner keeps grinning as he makes a gun with his fingers and aims it at Tom, before they both turn back the way they came.

Okay. Well. Welcome to New York. Crap.

***

As Tom moves further into the city, he starts to see signs of shambles -- fairly fresh signs. It makes sense that New York would've been hardest hit, with the high population density and all, but it's still disheartening.

He keeps his gun out.

When he starts hearing intermittent shouts and gunshots down other streets, he gives the sun an incredulous look -- it's barely after noon -- and turns the safety off. He has no desire to get involved in a fight, though, so he starts taking turns to avoid the commotions.

It can't actually be said that this strategy gets him lost, because he didn't really know where he was in the first place, but: he is definitely, definitely lost now.

And he's even more lost when twilight starts to come on. Seriously, what the fuck? Isn't New York supposed to be easy to navigate? All those avenuse and boulevards and--

The sudden sound of a car engine coming around the corner, accompanied by what seem like incredibly bright headlights, makes him let out a very high-pitched shriek that he will deny being capable of producing to the end of his days. The fact that it's an ambulance helps him relax, but only a little.

The car comes screeching to a halt next to him. He swallows, debates, and keeps walking. It keeps pace with him as the passenger-side window rolls down. A round-faced, bespectacled, spiky-haired woman lenas out.

"Hey! Noob! C'mon, let us give you a ride."

So much for relaxing.

"What?" Tom tightens his grip on the gun. "Who're you?"

The woman sighs. "We're good samaritans who're trying to keep you from becoming a statistic. C'mon."

The girl in the driver's seat leans forward; Tom mostly gets an impression of a sharp, fine-boned face and glasses. "Look," she calls across the woman, "you're armed, you could definitely take me, and you could probably take Beth too. Come get in. It's not safe out there."

"We know a safe enclave you can spend the night."

". . . You don't seriously expect me to just say 'okay' and get in there, do you?" Beat. "And who the hell uses 'enclave' in conversation?"

The woman -- Beth -- shrugs. "It'd save a lot of time."

"And we do," adds the girl, offended.

Tom stares at them.

Okay. Two random girls in an ambulance who use fifty-cent-words without blinking have just driven up while he's lost, chilly, visibly armed, lost, hungry, and lost. And did we mention lost?

". . . Okay," he says, throwing up one hand in a what the fuck, I'm probably screwed anyway gesture, and gets in.

Tom hits Philadelphia as the sun is starting to sink in the west, sending his shadow out in front of him. It's the usual bizarrely empty cityscape, same as Detroit and Harrisburg. It's just weirder, this time, because Philadelphia has a sense of history. The buildings all look so old. It's like walking into a very newly wrecked Colosseum.

Tom wonders vaguely how the Liberty Bell stood up to the apocalypse.

He's learned his lesson about urban areas, and he has his gun out as he walks along I-76. The further he gets into the city, the more picked over things look. That means people, which might explain the lack of zombies. It does make it kind of awkward to scavenge anything for the night, though.

He starts seeing signs that point towards "University of Pennsylvania," though, about when he hits what looks like a railroad switching . . . thingy . . . junction? Anyway. U Penn. He perks up and follows the signs. Colleges, even the ones that have been heavily scavenged, tend to have stores of food and water, and often people living on them. Hell, if you can find an old dorm with normal locks on the doors instead of keycards, you can even sleep someplace safe.

. . . The problem with college campuses, he remembers, is that it's freaking impossible to tell what's what from the outside. He's about ready to throw up his hands and sleep in some lobby when he hears a cheerful female voice call across the way. "Hey!"

Turning, he spots a tall brunette in a messenger cap hurrying his way, waving. He waves back, tentatively, and she breaks into a trot.

"Hey!" she repeats, once she's closer. "Dude, come on, it's getting dark, you have to get inside."

"--Um!" he says, surprised. "Yeah, I'm trying to -- are there--? Is there anywhere I can sleep?"

"Yeah, come on!" She gestures back the way she came. "Theatre building's right this way. We'll get you set up."

It turns out her name is Rebecca, she's an English major, or was, and in spite of her easy, toothy grin, she's watching their surroundings carefully. She ushers him into an imposing building via an unimposing door marked BACKSTAGE, and then up a flight of winding concrete stairs to a balcony overlooking the demolished lobby.

"So," Tom asks, glancing over the railing, "why're you staying in the theater? Isn't it just a big empty space?"

"Well, we're staying in the classrooms mostly. Anyway, all the techies kind of congregated here, and they know how to build stuff and work electrics, so we've got repairs and some power. Plus I think there are more vending machines in this building than in any other one on cam--"

"Jesus Christ!" Tom interrupts. "There's a zombie down there!"

He's already grabbing for his gun as Rebecca strides over and follows his gaze. When he brings it up and takes aim, though, she puts out a hand.

"No, no, wait, don't! You don't have to shoot her! Hold on a sec--"

She darts for a room, and Tom watches her go, thinking sourly Great, just like Shaun. He watches the zombie down below -- what used to be a skinny curly-haired girl, with a pair of much mangled glasses still incongruously perched on her nose -- stagger vaguely around the lobby. Rebecca returns a minute later lugging a cardboard box.

"What're those?"

Rebecca grins. "Watch this." She reaches into the box and pulls out -- a book, very battered. "Bombs away," Rebecca tells him cheerfully, and hurls the book at the zombie. It lands short, with a thumb, but the zombie makes a distressed noise.

Tom reaches into the box and pulls out another book, staring at the cover. "Atlas Shrugged?"

"It only works with Ayn Rand," Rebecca explains, pulling out a copy of The Fountainhead. "Beats me why, though I can't really blame her. If I ever get bitten I expect people to pelt me with copies of Judith Butler."

She flings the book. It lands at the zombie's feet, and she shies -- well, shambles -- away in what has got to be disgust.

"That is the weirdest fucking thing I have ever seen, and I have seen some weird shit."

Rebecca leans on the railing, watching the zombie finally stagger her way out one of the ruined glass doors. "I think it's sad. I think she's just trying to get to the library and she can't remember the way. She just kind of circles campus; comes through here about once a week." Straightening, she adds, "We'll go get the books in the morning and re-use them. Now, you probably want somewhere to sleep, right?"

Shaking his head, Tom follows her up another flight of stairs to the costume shop, where he finds that a few bolts of muslin make a much better pillow than he'd expect. Or maybe he's just that tired from the last five days.